What do I think or get up to as an Oracle Professional, UKOUG Volunteer, ACE Director?
These are my personal views

Thursday, 5 November 2015

OOW15 - My Presentation Forming Your Future

I had one main session this year, although I did facilitate the EOUC More than 12 more on 12c session, and present a mini session on PaaS4SaaS in the OTN Cloud stage.The session was called Forming Your Future Upgrade/Migration to Oracle Fusion

As I said before OOW, this was not originally my session, but when Kashif Manzoor went to work for Oracle I got the opportunity to present my content against his title. I had the extract amended a little and reached out to see if there was a brave organisation who wanted to be my case study, but although I got a number of questions in advance no one actually stepped forward for what would have been free consultancy.

The session was at 8 am on the Sunday Morning, so I was literally kicking off Oracle Open World 2015. It worried me a little that the numbers would be low but i had 170 registrations before OOW. I know not everyone turns up but I think I had about 100 at the end.

Now it may be because I offered english chocolate and a cute english accent or because so many people had jet lag and were up anyway, but for whatever reason they came and seemed to enjoy it.

Just a few weeks before OOW I went to see an organisation who have made the commitment to go Cloud, from EBS but their existing support team wanted to understand more about what that meant, changes, approach and the project itself. My put together a number of slides rather as an aide memoire than a presentation and then talked with them about what we know this means. So I used a subset of those slides for my session.

When Oracle are selling cloud they talk about the solution and never about the technology, but if you are coming from an existing Oracle on-premise application, EBS, Peoplesoft, JDE etc you probably do want to know what is going on and I love to explain, how the new technologies are backed in and where they give you so much more functionality, and of course I get to talk about the user experience which is my specific expertise.

This was also my first OOW since I moved to Certus and have actually been working with customers everyday, not just from a strategic point of view but the reality and I loved it.